The spinach in your boxes this week has had its 15 minutes of fame. Along with a certain gangly farmer in a green shirt it has appeared in dozens of newspapers from coast to coast—including USA Today.
The photographer who took that picture was in as big of a hurry as I was to have it over with—something I was thankful for. It had been an exhausting couple of days. On top of overseeing the weekend harvest and trying to get the ground worked up for next year’s strawberry crop, Jeanne and I suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the media frenzy surrounding the e coli spinach scare.
It all started the day before, when a reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, who had come to our farm stand working on an unrelated story, saw that we were selling bunched spinach. He excitedly called in for a photographer and, as luck would have it, as soon as one arrived an articulate nurse happened into the stand to buy a bunch of spinach. She figured prominently in the article that appeared with the heading “High Ground Stands by Its Spinach” on the front page of the paper the next morning.
That very morning at around 8 o’clock as I was working with two UC researchers to set up a crop trial for next year’s strawberries, an AP reporter sent down from San Francisco came hobbling through the field with a video camera and a microphone. Jeanne, who had come to the stand with fresh bunches of spinach for the AP reporter to shoot video of was met there by a second news crew wanting an interview.
The focus on us selling our spinach shows how far-reaching the effects of the FDA warnings were. No store would carry spinach, and no restaurants could serve it. We could continue to sell our spinach because we are a self-contained small farm that was obviously not implicated in any way. We grow and wash our own produce and sell it directly to customers. With the centralized food distribution in this country that has become very rare. One of the reporters—a bit unclear on the whole concept—asked, “But what if it (the e coli) is in the water?” as if it were suddenly in everyone’s water (but somehow only affected spinach). She seemed to miss the point that if we had an e coli problem it would be in everything we sell, and that there was no earthly reason to think we had such a problem. The problem is that so much of the country’s spinach is processed in the same facility, making it difficult to find the source.
As quickly as they came, they all left and the scandal has died down. The e coli was traced back to Dole brand conventional spinach, processed at the Natural Selections plant. The FDA has now declared all spinach again safe to eat. I’m still a bit bewildered as to how we got caught up in the middle of it. When I reflect back on it the thing I am amazed by is, for all the effort they put into it, what a poor job the media does of actually informing people. While growers of bunched spinach in the Salinas Valley lost their shirts because people were under the impression that all spinach was somehow endemically bad, we heard secondhand reports that Natural Selections bagged salad sales had increased dramatically even though they are processed in the same facility as the tainted spinach.
The other thing that amazes me is how out of proportion the whole story became. One newscast I saw featured a reporter in front of a “command center” map highlighting all of the states in which the outbreak had “spread” to. To put things in perspective, according to the CDC, there are an estimated 76 million cases of food born illnesses in an average year including over 5000 deaths. There are over 73,000 cases of illness due to e-coli H0157:H7 alone every year. And if this year follows those trends, during the roughly two weeks that the scare lasted we would expect about 192 deaths due to food borne illnesses to have occurred.
Unlike most other spinach growers, we did not have to disc in our spinach field. In fact, we have been selling more spinach than ever at our farmstand once people heard that we had it. The crop we had planted for you is now ready to harvest, after its photo was shot around the world. The only danger you’re in is that it may start putting on airs.
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